Friday, November 23, 2007

On July 6, 2003, four months after the United States invaded Iraq, former ambassador Joseph Wilson's now historic op-ed, "What I Didn't Find in Africa," appeared in The New York Times. A week later, conservative pundit Robert Novak revealed in his newspaper column that Ambassador Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, was a CIA operative. The public disclosure of that secret information spurred a federal investigation and led to the trial and conviction of Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, and the Wilsons' civil suit against top officials of the Bush administration. Much has been written about the "Valerie Plame" story, but Valerie herself has been silent, until now. Some of what has been reported about her has been frighteningly accurate, serving as a pungent reminder to the Wilsons that their lives are no longer private. And some has been completely false--distorted characterizations of Valerie and her husband and their shared integrity.

Valerie Wilson retired from the CIA in January 2006, and now, not only as a citizen but as a wife and mother, the daughter of an Air Force colonel, and the sister of a U.S. marine, she sets the record straight, providing an extraordinary account of her training and experiences, and answers many questions that have been asked about her covert status, her responsibilities, and her life. As readers will see, the CIA still deems much of the detail of Valerie's story to be classified. As a service to readers, an afterword by national security reporter Laura Rozen provides a context for Valerie's own story. [Description provided by the publisher]

Tuesday, November 06, 2007

Bad Girls examines representational practices of film and television stories beginning with post-Vietnam cinema and ending with postfeminisms and contemporary public disputes over women in the military. The book explores a diverse range of popular media texts, from the Alien saga to Ally McBeal and Sex and the City, from The Net and VR5 to Sportsnight and G.I. Jane. The research is framed as a study of intergenerational tensions in portrayals of women and public institutions - in careers, governmental service, and interactions with technology. Using iconic texts and their contexts as a primary focus, this book offers a rhetorical and cultural history of the tensions between remembering and forgetting in representations of the American feminist movement between 1979 and 2005. Looking forward, the book sets an agenda for discussion of gender issues over the next twenty-five years and articulates with authority the manner in which «transgression» itself has become a site of struggle. [Description provided by the publisher]

Noted historian Charles Adams has assembled an extraordinary collection of articles—never before collected and made available for easy study—written by foreign journalists at the time of the U.S. Civil War. These journals are a fount of insights about the war, and readers will be rewarded with a new appreciation for the views of contemporary foreign observers of America's war. Readers will realize that the Europeans seemed to know more about America's "quarrel," as they liked to call the war, than previously thought possible.

Foreign observers wrote in an atmosphere of freedom, without the dangers that crippled and destroyed journalism in America. Foreign writers were not arrested and locked up; nor were foreign journals silenced by armed soldiers, mobs, or by censorship of the mails, nor were their editors hauled off to prison. Also, the American Civil War was not their struggle, and, as the reader will discover, by looking at the quarrel from a distance the foreign correspondents could see what Americans at the scene could not. A broad sweep of views running from pro-North to pro-South, with foreign writers marshalling their arguments with facts and information that had come to their attention, is presented.

Among the many distinguished British journals represented are Blackwood's Magazine, The Saturday Review, Macmillan's Magazine, The Athenaeum, The Cornhill Magazine, The Economist, The Times and two periodicals edited by Charles Dickens—Household Words and All the Year Round. From the continent there are translated articles from the French La Presse and Revue des Deux Monde, the Italian La Civilta Cattolica and Scritti Editie Inediti, and the Spanish Pensamiento Espanol and La Iberia. Civil War historians and students will certainly benefit from the fascinating observations afforded by the golden age of periodical literature presented in Slavery, Secession, and Civil War.

About the Author: Charles Adams, the world's leading scholar on the history of taxation, is the author of the best selling books For Good and Evil, Those Dirty Rotten Taxes, and Fight, Flight, and Fraud.

Friday, November 02, 2007

When African American intellectuals announced the birth of the "New Negro" around the turn of the twentieth century, they were attempting through a bold act of renaming to change the way blacks were depicted and perceived in America. By challenging stereotypes of the Old Negro, and declaring that the New Negro was capable of high achievement, black writers tried to revolutionize how whites viewed blacks--and how blacks viewed themselves. Nothing less than a strategy to re-create the public face of "the race," the New Negro became a dominant figure of racial uplift between Reconstruction and World War II, as well as a central idea of the Harlem, or New Negro, Renaissance. Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Gene Andrew Jarrett, The New Negro collects more than one hundred canonical and lesser-known essays published between 1892 and 1938 that examine the issues of race and representation in African American culture.

These readings--by writers including W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Alain Locke, Carl Van Vechten, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright--discuss the trope of the New Negro, and the milieu in which this figure existed, from almost every conceivable angle. Political essays are joined by essays on African American fiction, poetry, drama, music, painting, and sculpture. More than fascinating historical documents, these essays remain essential to the way African American identity and history are still understood today.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University. His most recent books include Finding Oprah's Roots and The Trials of Phillis Wheatley. Gene Andrew Jarrett is associate professor of English and African American studies at Boston University. He is the author of Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature. [All descriptive information contained in this post has been provided by the publisher, http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8492.html]

In a stunning indictment of the Bush administration and Congress, best-selling author Naomi Wolf lays out her case for saving American democracy. In authoritative research and documentation Wolf explains how events of the last six years parallel steps taken in the early years of the 20th century’s worst dictatorships such as Germany, Russia, China, and Chile. [Description provided by the publisher]